The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [101]
I carefully thumb through the diary one last time. As the thousands of words fly by, it is not a line of H.V.’s but instead one of Joe’s that comes to mind:
What is past—the past—does not, nor will it, detach itself and remain where it was (or where it might have been intended to have remained) but it must bring itself forward, and smilingly, or otherwise, present itself as an old friend.
Seventeen
LAST NIGHT I HAD ONE OF MY REOCCURRING DREAMS. NO, NOT the one where I’m doing house chores with celebrities, but the dream of flunking my high school geometry exam. It’s a classic anxiety dream, in which I have completely forgotten that the final exam is today—right now, in fact—and I have not studied at all. In a variation on the theme, however, this one was set not at Gonzaga Prep but instead in UCSF’s Cole Hall. Upon waking, I felt panic and relief—such a sour mix of emotions—then bemusement. What I’d had was a sympathetic anxiety dream, I realized. Tomorrow is the med school anatomy final, you see, and today, I am helping Meri study for it.
We meet at 3:00 P.M. and find the lab filled with fellow cramming students. Dana, Kim, Dhillon, Charlie, and the other teachers move among them, tutoring small groups. Our table, number 24, has been taken over by a group of guys studying our cadaver’s shoulder joint, so Meri and I find a spare prosection of a leg to work with. This is one sorry-looking specimen. Were it not already dead, I would say it looked studied to death. Well-utilized is perhaps the better phrase. I can’t help wondering how many students over the years have performed the anatomical equivalent of musical scales on this severed leg, calling off the sequence of muscles, nerves, arteries, and veins.
Meri, continuing the tradition, gamely takes the long limb into her hands. “Rectus femoris,” she states confidently, plucking the prominent muscle running straight down the front of the thigh.
“Indeed,” I confirm.
“Okay, and this”—Meri fingers an inner thigh muscle—“vastus medius?”
“Medialis,” I correct.
“Right, right, right. Vastus medialis. So this one”—she moves to the outer side of the leg—“is vastus lateralis. And then, down here, underneath rectus femoris, is”—she points to a slender slab of muscle—“vastus intermedius.”
“Exactly. You’ve got it.”
From here, I steer Meri through the arteries and veins, but honestly, by the time we get to the nerves of the lower leg, we have switched roles, with Meri teaching me the material I missed while in London. And as we move on to prosections of the arm and hand, it is clear that she knows far more about these parts than I do. Through her other classes, Meri, like all the other med students, has learned about myotomes and dermatomes and the actions of each muscle group and the clinical implications of injuries to various parts. In the lab, I now have little more to do than hold the prosected hand and, in a figurative sense, Meri’s hand as well, offering her exam-eve encouragement. Really, though, there is no reason for her to be nervous. She’s going to ace the final, I can tell.
For Meri, Kolja, Marissa, and the others, the conclusion of this course marks a mere first step in their studies, a foundation they are already rapidly building upon, but for me, this is an epilogue of sorts. I am not interested in studying more anatomy, going further in the field. Instead, I would like a better understanding of how the human body came to be, how it became what it is, this complicated, magnificently designed structure. I would like to study evolution.
Knowing I am not really helping Meri much, I suggest that she join one of the tutored groups, and at a nearby table, we find Kim quizzing a clutch of students gathered around a brutally dissected body. I watch for a while as Kim, gently, wryly, authoritatively, puts them through their paces: “David, which nerve innervates this muscle…here?” “And, Meri, what spinal nerve segment would you say it originates